Water flows ceaselessly through the arteries of Robert Gober’s solitary faucet, as if it were a trickling monument to the Sisyphean impossibility of cleanliness. Originally made in response to the AIDS crisis, Gober’s handcrafted sink is recontextualized in the age of Covid-19. Facing it, I resist the impulse to reach out and submerge my hands in its water, CDC guidelines flashing in my mind–to keep your loved ones safe and help prevent the spread of COVID-19, you should wash your hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. On the opposite wall, a more recent sculpture completed by Gober during the pandemic depicts a lonely windowsill adorned with cobwebs, packing bubbles, cigarette butts, dental floss, and a conch shell. Paper snowflakes adhered to the pane with scotch tape allude to the flimsy veil between private space and the outside world. As most of us became more familiar with our own windowsills during lockdown, we also became more aware of our patterns of consumption, as waste flowed in and out of our homes like eternally unsatiated drains. I’m confronted with another familiar window on the adjacent wall: the night sky. Vija Celmins’ realist paintings rendered from photographs of the stars are meditations on the passing of time via the emittance of light. There’s a scale shift at play—as dirt and water seem to flow endlessly through our drains, so too does light surge through the universe. I enjoy the idea of dirt as stardust, like glimmering cinders—material remnants of existence itself. Derrida uses the cinder as a metaphor to describe our inability to memorialize the passing of time: “The fire: what one cannot extinguish in this trace among others that is a cinder. Memory or oblivion, but of the fire, trait that still relates to the burning. No doubt the fire has withdrawn, the camouflages, it disguises itself, beneath the multiplicity, the dust, the makeup powder, the insistent pharmakon of a plural body that no longer belongs to itself, there is the essence of the cinder, its cinder itself.”

Matthew Marks Gallery
1062 N Orange Grove Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90046
On view through December 23, 2022